Your thoughtful comments and warm welcome to iLand have touched my heart deeply.   My most sincere  "Dhanyavaad" for your kindness.  You words have given me the strength to tolerate the physical pain and incapacity for another day.   As I sit writing to my new iLand friends, I must stop every few moments, as my hand flies to my throat to apply the external pressure necessary to breathe.  My operation in 2001 left me with a condition known as "positional airway obstruction".   I have learned that the body will instinctively adapt to whatever posture it must to draw breath.. to survive.  From the moment I awoke from this surgery I could not breathe.  Since that day I have not been able to breathe or swallow normally, I cannot  lift my head or close my jaw with my spine held straight.   

Yes, the physical infirmity is difficult to deal with, particularly as my life's work centered around the physical activity of professional gardening.  Now I cannot take a simple walk or even drive a car, because I cannot lift my head to see in front of me and breathe at the same time.  I confess to feeling sorry for myself at times, but not for the reasons you might think.  I live alone and am fiercely independent.  I do not want help in doing the chores we all must do to live.  I have a very high pain threshold and continually astonish myself at the body's ability to survive.  We all accept physical challenges and work with and around them, until we cannot.

What I cannot accept and never will is the ability of medical doctors to deny and/or lie about a condition so blatantly apparent.. to refuse appropriate x-rays so they may continue in their lies.  There have been a few doctors who sincerely wanted to help me and ordered proper diagnostics which revealed abnormalities in swallowing related to the surgeries.   But these were not plastic surgeons.. they were ear nose and throat and pulmonary specialists.. doctors who diagnose and treat serious conditions due to disease, trauma and congenital defect.   Yet  they  are intimidated by the so called "experts".. the plastic surgeons who will lie and deny until the fires of Hell freeze before they will admit their mistakes.

I am not a basher of doctors who practice medicine with integrity and ethically.  I know many such doctors and have even lived and worked with one for many years before his death in 1990.  I have always tended to cut doctors more slack than the average patient because I understand the difficulties they face.  But I have come to realize that surgeons who perform cosmetic procedures are an entirely different breed from the rest of the profession.  They are driven entirely by ego and greed.  They have created this craze of mutilation of normal, healthy anatomy, for without them, these operations would not exist.  They capitalize on the  insecurity they create in healthy people with normal appearance.

Cosmetic surgical procedures are so widely accepted now that I cannot foresee this barbaric trend ever dying out.  It is accepted as "self improvement" or "self enhancement"..  I am most concerned about the younger generation, growing up in a society that looks upon this gruesome carving of one's flesh as "normal". 

Thank you for listening to this lone voice of reason amidst the cacophony of those trying to convince people that their healthy bodies are not good enough the way they are. 

Namaste

Read about my experience on this website:
http://groups.msn.com/LosingFace


(PS: Photo shows one of the many "devices" I have been forced to invent and use to breathe with my head held high enough to drive and see in front of me.   Unfortunately, this one, like all the others, no longer work)